Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said, “Have no doubt… Allah willing, Islam will conquer what? It will conquer all the mountain tops of the world.”
Omar Ahmad, the cofounder and longtime Board chairman of the influential Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood front group known as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), has said that “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”
Majid Khadduri was an Iraqi scholar of Islamic law of international renown. In his book War and Peace in the Law of Islam, which was published in 1955 and remains one of the most lucid and illuminating works on the subject, Khadduri says this about jihad:
The state which is regarded as the instrument for universalizing a certain religion must perforce be an ever expanding state. The Islamic state, whose principal function was to put God’s law into practice, sought to establish Islam as the dominant reigning ideology over the entire world….The jihad was therefore employed as an instrument for both the universalization of religion and the establishment of an imperial world state. (P. 51)
Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, Assistant Professor on the Faculty of Shari’ah and Law of the International Islamic University in Islamabad. In his 1994 book The Methodology of Ijtihad, he quotes the twelfth century Maliki jurist Ibn Rushd: “Muslim jurists agreed that the purpose of fighting with the People of the Book…is one of two things: it is either their conversion to Islam or the payment of jizyah.” Nyazee concludes: “This leaves no doubt that the primary goal of the Muslim community, in the eyes of its jurists, is to spread the word of Allah through jihad, and the option of poll-tax [jizya] is to be exercised only after subjugation” of non-Muslims.
A Shafi’i manual of Islamic law endorsed by the most prestigious institution in Sunni Islam, Al-Azhar University in Cairo? It says that the leader of the Muslims “makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians…until they become Muslim or else pay the non-Muslim poll tax,” and cites Koran 9:29 in support of this idea: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day and who forbid not what Allah and His messenger have forbidden-who do not practice the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book-until they pay the poll tax out of hand and are humbled.” (‘Umdat al-Salik o9.8)
Wishful Thinking Alert: “Study: Muslim extremists not looking for world domination,” by Adam Levine for CNN, July 10 (thanks to all who sent this in):
Muslim extremists are more concerned with defending against foreign intrusion than foisting Islam on the world, according to a new study of extremist texts. The study suggests that a Western approach of claiming extremists are seeking world domination is misdirected, and instead should seek to counteract claims of victimhood.
“Continued claims to the contrary, by both official and unofficial sources, only play into a ‘clash of civilizations’ narrative that benefits the extremist cause. These claims also undermine the credibility of Western voices, because the audience knows that extremist arguments are really about victimage and deliverance,” write the researchers, Jeffry Halverson, R. Bennett Furlow and Steven Corman.
Ah, yes. Don’t tell the truth about the Islamic supremacist desire to Islamize the world, because that only benefits the Islamic supremacists.
This study is rather remarkably insane. The U.S. Government, military, and intelligence apparatus have already determined not to tell the truth about the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, and now this new study is urging us to pretend that there is no conflict at all. Those jihad attacks, jihad plots, jihad/martyrdom bombings worldwide? If free people would just stop fighting back, all would be well!
The analysis by Arizona State University’s Center for Strategic Communication looked at how the Quran was used in 2,000 propoganda items from 1998 to 2011, though the majority were from post-2007, that emanated mostly from the Middle East and North Africa. Among the groups analyzed were al Qaeda and al Shabaab, as well as anonymous postings online.
One result that surprised the researchers, the “near absence” of citations from one of the most extreme passages, the “Verse of Swords,” that encourages “all-out war against world domination.”
“Widely regarded as the most militant or violent passage of the Quran, it is treated as a divine call for offensive warfare on a global scale,” the researchers wrote. “It is also regarded as a verse which supersedes over 100 other verses of the Quran that counsel patience, tolerance and forgiveness.”
At least they weren’t craven enough to ignore that.
The study concludes that extremists, at least based on how they quote from the Quran, do not reflect “an aggressive offensive foe seeking domination and conquest of unbelievers, as is commonly assumed. Instead they deal with themes of victimization, dishonor and retribution.”
Of course they do. And that’s because there is no caliph. Only the caliph is authorized in Islamic law to wage offensive jihad. In the absence of a caliph, defensive jihad is obligatory on every Muslim when a Muslim land is attacked. Hence jihadist texts of the present day generally harp on victimhood, in order to justify the jihad in question as defensive.
“The verses frequently utilized by extremists from this surah address subjects such as enduring hardships and the importance of fighting against the unjust unbelievers who oppress men, women and children,” the researchers wrote about the most cited chapter (called a “surah”).
Clearly this is because one of the most important present-day jihads is the “Arab Spring” series of uprisings against Arab nationalist rulers in the Middle East and North Africa who did not fully implement Sharia.